Allies’ approach cautious

Allied soldiers inched toward Baghdad on Sunday and killed or captured about 150 paramilitary fighters in a southern stronghold, trying at every turn to root out loyalists of Saddam Hussein and stay safe from those who may be combatants in disguise.

The military campaign has increasingly become a confidence-building one, too, and not only in Iraq. U.S. war leaders, deployed on the Sunday airwaves, defended their strategy as a sound one and cast the painstaking pace of recent days as a virtue.

“We have the power to be patient in this, and we’re not going to do anything before we’re ready,” said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

U.S. and British allies reported increased contacts with ordinary Iraqis on many fronts Sunday, a development measured – like the march toward Baghdad – in wary steps.

The reason for the caution was clear: persistent danger from plainclothes killers – Iraqi officials have warned that there will be more suicide attacks like the one that took the lives of four Americans in Najaf. Iraqis said some 4,000 Arabs have come to Iraq to help attack the invaders.

Airstrikes on Baghdad stretching from Sunday into today targeted Iraqi leaders, command and control centers and communications facilities, Pentagon officials said. The government’s Information Ministry was in flames after Tomahawk cruise missiles strikes.

Recommended Stories For You

The Army’s 82nd Airborne Division killed about 100 “regime terror squad members” and captured about 50 prisoners at the Shiite holy city of Najaf and Samana in south-central Iraq, according to U.S. Central Command. It did not further identify the “terror squads.”

In Nasiriyah, where fighting has been fierce for a week, Marines secured buildings held by an Iraqi infantry division that contained large caches of weapons and chemical decontamination equipment.

A Marine UH-1 Huey helicopter crashed Sunday night at a forward supply and refueling point in southern Iraq, said a spokesman, 1st Lt. John Niemann, in Kuwait. Three people aboard were killed and one was injured in the crash that occurred while the helicopter was taking off.

Questions grew in Washington over the war’s pace.

Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said the U.S.-led invasion is clearly facing more Iraqi resistance than anticipated and the war plan will probably have to be adjusted to deal with that.

“I consider them not to be trivial setbacks,” he said on CNN’s “Late Edition,” but rather “in the category of major problems.”

Gen. Tommy Franks, the coalition commander, said: “One never knows how long a war will take.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell sought to allay concern about the war’s progress in an evening speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, expressing “total confidence in the plan and total confidence in General Franks and those carrying out the plan.”

“Let there be no doubt of the outcome,” he said. “We will drive Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”

Close to 100,000 U.S. service members are in Iraq, supported by about 200,000 in the theater with 100,000 more on the way.

U.S. officials said coalition ground forces were closing in on Baghdad from the south, west and north – the southern front lines now 49 miles from the capital. Myers said airstrikes have reduced some units of the Republican Guard, Saddam’s best-trained forces, to less than half their prewar capacity.